Comment by jaggederest
1 day ago
Toyota, like many companies that succeed based on merits beyond the aesthetic, secretly dreams of being an aesthetics-first company like, say, Porche or Ferrari, and always tries their hardest to reject reality so that they can do the sexy-but-awful thing instead of the amazing-but-ugly thing.
You see this recently over the last couple years in tech where everyone is "an AI company" even when they make something totally unrelated - same impulse, different industry.
I've noticed this too.
It is completely baffling.
There must be something seriously wrong with our economy that companies operating like this don't go bankrupt and/or get driven out of business.
The problem with our economy is basically wealth concentration, partly funded by central banks and partly by lack of billionaire taxation. In a traditional economy, money was meant to always flow circularly, throughout the whole economy. Rich people could exist, but they could only exist by commanding a large upward flow of money from poor/middle people, so they had to offer something really good in return. These days the money mostly circulates between different rich people with only some loss back down to the poorer classes, so to get money they have to impress other rich people instead of poorer people. Companies who go full AI don't attract customers (unless B2B), they attract investors because the investors have all the money and the customers don't.
> partly funded by central banks
What's the specific mechanism that you're referring to here?
> partly by lack of billionaire taxation
How dare you say this? These billionaires all work extremely hard for their money!